Title: Northanger Abbey

Author: Jane Austen

Pages: 239

Rating:  5/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Winter TBR

Northanger Abbey, originally published posthumously in 1818, is the story of seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland, one of ten children of a country clergyman, whose wild imagination and excessive fondness for Gothic novels (especially Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho) has skewed her worldview and interactions with others to great comic effect. 

Fundamentally a parody of the Gothic fiction that was so popular in Austen's formative years, Northanger Abbey is a uniquely significant work, in that it shows Austen's departure from those conventions and tropes -- featuring three dimensional heroines, who were not perfect people, but flawed, rounded characters who behaved naturally and not just as the novel's plot demanded. 

Part of my 2022 reaching plan is to reread all six of the completed Jane Austen novels. This time, I am going to read them in the order that Austen wrote them. So up first is Northanger Abbey. Instead of making a new review, I am just copying my review from my last reading of this volume in 2012. Here’s what I wrote:

“Northanger Abbey is fast becoming my second favorite Austen (after Persuasion, of course).  I love Catherine Morland.  She may be young and naive, but she grows.  She becomes a woman right in front of the reader.  I love the progression more than anything.  I see an early version of Emma in Catherine.  She's not as well defined as a character, but the idea of character so wrong in her worldview comes through.  This volume doesn't have the recognizable quotes that Pride and Prejudice does, but it does have some good discussions between Tilney and Catherine about life and literature.  And the novel doesn't have the extensive social commentary so prominent in P&P and Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park.  But that's okay.  This is more of a nice story of a girl growing into a woman and falling in love.”

BBC Miniseries :

I love this movie.  I love the leads, Felicity Jones and JJ Fields.  I love the Abbey.  I love Bath.  I even love Isabella Thorpe, that snake.  (Carey Mulligan is equal parts likable and killable...)  Every part was perfectly cast.  I don't even mind the dramatization of Catherine's gothic stories.  It fits with her character even if Jane Austen didn't write them in there.  In fact, this is fast becoming my third favorite movie adaptation of Austen (after P&P BBC version and Persuasion new BBC version).